Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Best Homework Ever

In Kyrgyzstan it was hard to find students with imagination so many homework assignments about their lives were quite dull. Once I gave a homework assignment to an Upper-Intermediate class to write sentences using new vocabulary we'd learned. This particular class was mostly teenagers but I had one middle-aged Kyrgyz woman whose seriousness always brought about heated debates with other students. She handed in this homework assignment and this successfully helped me convince the office staff that she wasn't really high Upper-Intermediate material. This hung on my wall all year in Bishkek and I also carried her assignment from Kyrgyzstan through Central Asia and Turkey, where it has since been sitting on my bookshelf getting a laugh out of me every time it catches my eye. I can't even figure out if she googled the words and wrote an excerpt of the first sentence she found containing said words or if she used a dictionary and translated from Russian or Kyrgyz or if she did something entirely different- but I can guarantee that these definitions are not her own mind's creation. See for yourself- what level would you place her in?

Click for the larger picture.



(the missing section for 'militia' reads "against a criminal")

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